Use Link Explorer to Improve Your Auto Dealership SEO

Use Link Explorer to Improve Your Auto Dealership SEO

Moz Link Explorer used to suck. (Don’t believe us? Just read this Moz blog post about it.)

After a major revamp to this product formally known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer has a new feel and lots of new features. We’re highlighting our favorite updates and how you can use them in your auto marketing efforts.

What Is Link Explorer?

Moz is a company that seeks to make online marketing easier. It works exclusively with search engine optimization (SEO) and offers tools like Link Explorer, which you can use free for a limited number of times or upgrade to a subscription.

Link Explorer is pretty much what it sounds like — it’s a link analysis tool.

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link back to your own site. These are also called inbound links or backlinks, and they’re crucial for a killer SEO strategy.

In fact, link building is one of the most important things you can do for your auto dealership SEO — and it’s also one of the most overlooked.

To rank higher in Google, you need other websites linking to your content — it’s that simple. But not just any websites. Google values quality over quantity. It’d be better to have a single backlink from MotorTrend than 50 backlinks from random sites no one has ever heard of.

Why You Should Use Link Explorer?

Hopefully, you’ve got an idea of why Link Explorer is important for automotive SEO, but if you like things spelled out, here are a few highlights.

1. Evaluate Your Own Link Building Strengths and Weaknesses

inbound links help you discover who is linking to your website

Is your website lacking backlinks? Or maybe you have plenty of links — maybe it’s the quality of those links that are lacking.

Either way, identify those areas of improvement. With the Inbound Links section, you can see data points such as:

  • Which pages are being linked to
  • Which phrases are most commonly used as anchor text
  • The spam score of the linking websites
  • And much more!

On the flip side, if you’ve got some pages that are performing particularly well in the link building department, notice the trends there. What strategies can you emulate for future pages?

2. Evaluate Your Competitors’ Link Building Strengths and Weaknesses

analyze competitor link building

Since all Link Explorer needs from you is a URL, who says it has to be your URL? Type a competitor’s website into the box, and see what comes up. If your competitor’s results look good, search for ideas you can (legally and ethically) steal.

Link Explorer also has a fantastic competitive analysis feature that allows you to see up to three other websites’ results side by side. It’s a really useful tool for finding similarities and differences at a glance.

3. Find Other Opportunities for Backlinks

Find Link Building Opportunities

Jealous of your competitors’ backlinks? Don’t just sit there and stew about it — go out and get those backlinks for yourself!

It might sound sneaky, but try reaching out to some of the websites that are linking to your competitors to see if those sources would be willing to throw some links your way as well. In exchange, offer to link to their content on your own site. Hey, it’s fair game! You can easily do this with the Link Intersect option within Link Explorer.

If your dealership has multiple stores, consider building backlinks among your stores to increase your page rank. It might seem counterintuitive, but you’re really just linking to yourself, so you’ll reap double benefits!

Our 3 Favorite Moz Link Explorer Features

We’ve been playing around in the new Moz Link Explorer for a year now. We knew from the beginning that we’d probably love most updates, but we wanted to take time to delve into how they work and how they can help anyone trying to improve SEO.

Here are the top three favorite Link Explorer updates from our SEO team.

1. New Discovered and Lost Links

find new links to your website

Ever wondered, What other sites link to mine? Link Explorer has you covered.

With the previous Open Site Explorer, you could see only the names of sites linking to you. Now you can see which sites have recently linked to your website or dropped your link.

2. Much More Data with Live Link Index

use link building to help your automotive seo

You’d expect that a site devoted to link building would have the best index of sites out there. That wasn’t the case with the old Open Site Explorer. It indexed maybe a tenth of what other sites crawled.

Now, the tool indexes several hundred million sites and trillions of pages and links. Welcome to the 21st century, Link Explorer.

3. Faster Link Tracking Data

Moz Link Explorer

Since the March 2018 update to Link Explorer, link tracking is much faster. It used to take several weeks, if not a month or two, to see metrics for new URLs.

Now, data updates about every 24 hours, meaning you’ll be able to look at insights on any new pages to your website much quicker.

Start Linking!

Moz Link Explorer can help you stand out from the competition when it comes to backlinking. It’s easy to use and understand . . . but it can be a wormhole if you have a lot of opportunities to grow your website.

Don’t have time? 9 Clouds can assist you in all things SEO, not just backlinking.

Start by downloading our free eBook, SEO for Auto Dealers. You’ll learn how to:

  • Get started with automotive SEO
  • Correctly employ on-page,
    off-page, and local SEO
  • Find and incorporate the right keywords for your website
  • Make your VDPs stand out with great SEO tactics
  • Start (and maintain) nine key digital marketing strategies for your dealership
SEO ebook for auto dealers

Download the SEO for Auto Dealers eBook

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